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Bel’s Year in Gaming

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Path to Madness

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Firstly I feel like I need to lead off this morning by saying… I am feeling much better.  Thanks for all the support yesterday, and I have to admit that a video shared to me by ChibiSeira helped a lot as well.  Part of the problem is…  I have been reviewing my blog for a project that you can see above.  Normally this isn’t a big deal, but depression loves to lie to you.  It makes things seem worse than they actually are, and in my mind…  I have been in this present down cycle for months and months.  The reality however is this current phase has only really been there since late October at the earliest and more specifically in this post Thanksgiving stress period that leads to the end of the year.  Basically my down cycle is happening during the most stressful and hectic part of the year so it is absolutely expected.  I’ve probably had one of these cycles every single year of my life, but where things wound up getting a little cross wired yesterday was the fact that at the time of posting…  I had only actually managed to make it through June.  So sifting through my blog it seemed like I was so active and so functional during the first half of the year… and the depression filled in the blanks and told me that I was absolutely useless for the tail end of the year.  Hell to be truthful with August and September I have no clue how I ended up playing so many things… especially considering it is another massively stressful time of the year as my wife starts a new school year again.

Basically as I finished sifting through this years worth of blog posts…  it made me realize that my brain was in fact telling lies to me.  That sure the last few weeks have been a bit sparse, with me getting sucked back into World of Warcraft again…  but that this is in no way indicative of the year as a whole.  Essentially the above image started as me wanting to know the answer to a simple question…  “How long of a break did I take from World of Warcraft?”.  From here it shifted into… “wouldn’t it be cool to plot the various MMOs I have played this year” to finally “fuck it lets just plot everything I talked about in my blog”.  To the best of my knowledge this represents all of the games that I wrote about this year in one form or another, which pretty closely marries to the games that I have played.  If you are really curious you can see the actual google sheet that I built the image off of.  I am sure there are little blips here and there that I poked my head in but never thought to write about them, but for the sake of this discussion we are safe just assuming that for one reason they weren’t that important to me.  The list as a whole currently includes sixty eight different games, and I underlined the games that represented the AggroChat Game Club titles.  The first thing you will notice is that I am absolutely very much an “MMO Gamer”.  Thirty Six of the games fall into the loose bubble that is “MMO” or “Online” game, and in many months I was playing more than one of these actively.

The Win Condition

One of the things I have come to realize is that apparently I am wired oddly these days, and this has been highlighted through participating in AggroChat and namely the Game Club.  My Co-Hosts often seem to focus on whether or not they have beaten a game, and honestly…  this rarely ever enters my mind.  My focus seems to be on the playing and whether or not that was enjoyable.  The funny thing is…  I was not always this way.  I remember during the Nintendo era, my friend Wade and I had a running competition to see who could beat the most games and as a result we both had lists of the games we had beaten.  My focus was always on trying to churn through the game as fast as possible to get to the end, and then something changed.  I was introduced to the internet, and the social aspect of gaming through IRC and MUDs.  Then when Everquest was released and I was subsequently “jumped into” playing it… to borrow a phrase from Beau Hindman… my focus became about the experience and the social aspect of playing an MMO.  Years later… I still MOSTLY play MMOs and when I play single player games…  it becomes about the exploration and savoring the moment to moment game play and less about the win condition.

I guess this makes sense as MMOs generally have no win condition at all, but are instead a sequence of small moment to moment game play experiences that continue to build upon each other making up the overall game experience.  Basically I find that I don’t like my single player experiences to end.  When I play Mass Effect 2 for example, I spend time doing every single side mission because I know once I start that one mission…  it is all over but the crying.  That zeroing in on the end of the game is the least exciting part of the equation for me.  Similarly I tend to avoid the main story line in both Fallout and Elder Scrolls games like the plague, because in the past at least they have had a similar problem of ending the game… when you finish the main quest.  Then there are games that kill your character as part of the main story arc, and I find them insanely unsatisfying because even if I am not playing it… I like to think my character is out there somewhere moving around in the world without me… still existing.  I think this is ultimately why I will always favor Mass Effect 2 to 3….  and will always take that one option in Dragon Age Origins.  Basically I have been conditioned through playing MMOs to not want the enjoyable experience to ever end.  So often I get right up to the end of a game… and then just stop playing it.  When I revisited Wolfenstein New Order for example… I was less than fifteen minutes away from beating the game… but there was a part of me that desperately did not want to do it.

Happy Festivus!

The fact that I managed to create a post this morning is a Festivus Miracle!!!  That’s right folks… it is Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us.  Right now the game play for the rest of the year is to dig into some of the things I played and talk about various experiences…  like the game that surprised me or the game I struggled with the most.  Not everything I played was amazing, but a lot of it actually kinda was.  I am also hoping to finally beat the main storyline for Fallout 4, and maybe do the same for a few other games that I left stranded like Witcher 3.  In any case, I hope you have a happy whatever it is that you want to celebrate.  Be it Christmas, or Festivus, or a belated Chanukah… or ever a Super Christmas nod to my friend Grace…  I hope you enjoy whatever it is that you celebrate with friends and family.  Right now we have this awesome Christmas day planned of marathoning through the original Star Wars movies and then going to see seven in the theaters since my wife and one of her friends have yet to see it.  I seriously could not think of a more perfect way to spend the day.

 

Pushing Away

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Lamentation

I posted the above statement, but I didn’t really have the strength to go into more detail last night.  Essentially I have been sifting through my blog in an attempt to summarize the year… which is one of those things that you feel like you SHOULD do at the end of a given year.  There are so many end of year traditions going on in the blogosphere, and I guess in some what I felt like I needed to do something.  The problem with this notion is it seems like the person that existed in the first half of the year, was one hell of a lot happier than the person for the last half of the year.  In January I had just attended my first gaming convention, and was super excited about Final Fantasy XIV and the raid…  and still pretty damned excited about the progress being made in World of Warcraft.  I was somehow juggling as many as four nights of raiding a week, streaming pretty regularly, along with a new column on MMOGames and a second podcast in the form of Bel Folks Stuff.  Now zooming back to today, both the FFXIV and WoW raids are dead in the water…  and I have backed almost completely out of MMOGames and essentially killed off the Bel Folks Stuff podcast… and it has been several months since I have even vaguely attempted to stream anything.

I know at some point I just got overwhelmed and started locking up… and I guess I never quite unlocked.  I am still in trauma mode where I am moving from day to day on mostly muscle memory.  There are a lot of things that I just don’t do anymore, not the least of which is read blogs on a regular basis.  During the “Bonanza” column I was reading roughly 450 blogs and every post on them all in preparation for my weekly column highlighting the posts contained within.  Once I handed that column off to another blogger… I quite literally stopped reading blogs all together for awhile.  I had turned this thing that I got a lot of enjoyment out of into a job, and that is the sure fire way to make me stop wanting to do something.  I now read blogs… but do so extremely infrequently…  and feel like a complete failure for allowing myself to get to that state.  I think as a result my own blog has suffered, because so often there would be a topic going around the blogosphere…  and reading the thoughts of another friend would end up sparking me to write my own take on it.  Now I sit down each morning and struggle to come up with anything to write about at all.

Cessation

There have been several points this year where I have contemplated just stopping all of it.  I’ve considered backing out of the podcast, and stopping with the daily posting.  It feels like I have been pushing away from all of the things I have cared about, one by one…  and each time I do it I just feel more of a failure for doing so.  I have been struggling greatly with just existing, let alone being happy and excited and engaging.  What makes this even harder is looking back and seeing that apparently I had whatever magical sauce there is at the beginning of the year, but it is almost completely gone now.  The frustrating part about it is…  I am not sure how to get it back.  I realize I have to start putting myself out there, a little bit at a time…  but even the thought of logging into voice chat on a nightly basis feels like the biggest possible hill to climb.  It has been at least three months since I have regularly logged into voice chat on a nightly basis, and maybe that is a good first step.  The problem being that the games that I am playing right now and not the games that the rest of the AggroChat and Stalwart crews are playing.  I really am enjoying World of Warcraft again, but even when I am logged in it feels like I am completely disconnected from everyone in it.

There were moments last night where I was asked to help out a few friends, and it felt like it took all of the effort in the world to accept.  I spent time with Giulietta doing the Pit daily quest, and I need to do this more often since I too need a bunch of them to complete the flying requirement.  I had fun while doing it, but it always requires so much effort to get over that hurdle to put myself out there… and actually do something with another human being.  Similarly I forced myself to go do stuff with Finni/Qav when I was hordeside because I knew once I got started I would enjoy myself, but it is entirely too easy to stay mired in my own oblivious world.  I realize what I am describing is depression, and I have battled it my entire life.  I am going through what I would term as a “down cycle” but this one seems to have been going on longer than most.  Generally I go through a few weeks of retreat and then that energizes me to the point of being able to engage again.  This time… it just seems to keep dragging on and no amount of “fake it until you make it” is working this time.  There just seems to always bee some external stress force bearing down on me, and I am hoping that being off for the Christmas break will help some of this.

Ashenvale

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As far as gaming goes…  I feel like I had a night without a lot of progress.  The focus of my evening was largely  the holiday event, where I complete all of the daily quests on the four characters that can do them…  mail all of the tokens to Belgrace… and then become crushed when I realize that yet again I have no mounts.  Lodur and I decided that we are going to create #Team360NoMount and the only requirement is that RNG and Blizzard hates you too.  I have this lengthy history of not getting holiday mounts to drop.  I have the two from Brew Fest, but other than that I have a perfect record of always participating… but never getting the mount.  The sorest point for me is always going to be the Headless Horseman mount, because it is probably the one I want the most…  but will never actually see.  I do admit though that this years Yeti mount is going to be a close second in the amount of pining I will do if I don’t get it to drop.  There are few cooler things than riding around on the back of a big damned Yeti.

As far as actual game progress I managed to push my Warlock to 21 and am now sitting in Ashenvale.  I took the start quest from the adventure guide, and happily cancelled all of the quests from the Northern Barrens.  I am wondering just how long I will actually be questing in Ashenvale before I do the same and move on to whatever zone comes after it.  The biggest positive of this of course is the fact that I can actually summon my Vendor Mammoth and sell things whenever I feel like it.  This is the toughest part of the sub 20 game in World of Warcraft, is being so insanely used to summoning a vendor whenever you want… but suddenly not having that ability.  I swear that mount is the single best item I have ever purchased in this game.  If I can ever get the cash to purchase the Yak from Pandaria, I am sure I will say the same about it….  since being able to Transmog my gear is just about of equal importance to me.  If I could summon a transmog vendor at any time I would never look fugly again!  Other than that I managed to knock out a few parts of the Hellfire LFR on the Cow, but didn’t really get anything worth writing home about other than a few more runes and some gold thanks to queuing as a partial group.

Week In Gaming 12/20/2015

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The Week of Star Wars

This week was all about either waiting for Force Awakens or riding the high after seeing it.  Some other stuff happened in the middle, like on Tuesday I went yet again to RiffTrax with some co-workers and had a blast.  This time around was Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny, and apparently it was a slightly new version where they include the story of Jack and the Beanstalk instead of apparently Thumbelina.  I have to take their word for it, because I did not manage to catch the previous version.  However coming up is a rebroadcast of Starship Troopers, which is one of the Riffs that happened before we started doing this as pseudo team building.  In truth it has very little to do with building morale… and more to do with the fact that we just share a similar sense of humor.  So I am looking forward to that in mid January.  The only negative with this week however is that quite literally I did not actually get to spend any length of time with my wife until Friday.  On the nights I had free she was up at school doing prep work for the end of the semester and the rest of the nights I had something going on.  I am really looking forward to the break however… because we tentatively have planned a movie marathon for Christmas day.  My wife has not seen the original Star Wars films since the theatrical release of the special editions in college.  So right now the plan is to marathon through all of them and take her to see Force Awakens afterwards.

Whole Lotta Nope

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There has been a lot of buzz about Black Desert Online, and largely the thing that everyone seems to talk about is just how detailed the character creation system is.  You certainly can create a bunch of really pretty characters, but for me at least that is where the game starts to fall apart.  I had largely avoided this game, because I didn’t like the concept of having classes tied to gender and to some extent “race” or what passes for race in the game.  So to play the berserker type class, you have to play this mammoth Giant race of a character.  My trip through Nopeland started however when I tried to install the game.  I had all sorts of issues just getting the installer going, and when I finally got it loaded it booted up and sat on a black screen for fifteen minutes or so before finally loading into the game.  The interface itself…  feels cheaply made and I am really not sure how to quantify it other than that.  Once you get into the game… you have an action MMO driven off of left and right mouse buttons.  I tooled around the starter area and honestly…  I just didn’t like what I was feeling.  It does a thing… that many other games have done better.  Sure the character creator allows you to pretty much live any possible player fantasy as far as looks go… but the game itself didn’t feel that fun.  So at this point I have already uninstalled it, and will throw this game is the same bin I tossed TERA.  Extremely pretty, but didn’t feel like I wanted it to feel.

Mount Chase

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I am not really sure how I allow myself to get drawn back into holiday events, but right now there is one happening in World of Warcraft that has a chance of dropping a Yeti mount.  Since the very first Winter Veil event, I have had an affinity with the Yeti, and used to save my charges of my mechanical Yeti each year so I could play with it off and on.  Similarly when they added the first mechanical yeti battle pet… I had to have it.  So it is no surprise that I am finding myself doing Holiday dailies each day in a vague attempt to get a Yeti mount from one of the Savage Gift satchels.  I am going to be pissed as hell if I do not manage to get one this year.  Essentially each day has the same basic flow, where I start with Belghast and cycle through all of my characters that can do the holiday quests… mailing all of the tokens to Belgrace on the horde side and then purchasing four savage gifts…  only to be disappointed moments later when none of them yield the mount.  I have managed to pick up the pet, so that at least is a positive.  Of all of the holiday mounts I have chased over the years…  I have very few of them.  The king of all teases has to be the Headless Horseman mount, that I always make attempts on… only to be disappointed when I have zero luck getting it.  The love rocket is another one, but that one I really don’t have much desire to get… other than for completion purposes.

Proper Tankadin

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This week a lot of my focus has been on the MooCowAdin, largely because he is the one opening all the Savage Gifts.  The root of my focus however has been to get a good weapon, which I FINALLY have in the form of the sword above.  It is a blue baleful that has been upgraded to 705 via the 20,000 apexis crystal token and two valor upgrades.  Finally I now feel like a proper tank, and am finally what I would consider a viable option for the Sunday night raid.  As a result I have been doing most of my daily quests in tanky form to get used to doing all the tankadin things.  I have to say I am absolutely in love with Light’s Hammer.  It is like the best possible version of Death and Decay… it slows and deals damage to enemies… and heals allies at the same time.  Who could ask for more?

The Orclock

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My downtime character is still Belghula the Orc Warlock.  I am enjoying leveling by dotting everything up and running around like mad until it dies.  Thanks to Tam for teaching me the ways of playing a damage over time class 🙂  At some point I need to start with the dungeons… but right now I am sitting just shy of 20.  The Northern Barrens are getting a little stale, so I am hoping that soon I will get the quest starter to jump to the next zone.  I’ve not really made it terribly far in the horde side quest chains, so I am kinda amped to see the later areas.  I am also working on leveling Tailoring so I have a bag maker, and enchanting so I have the ability to do enchants.  The next character I run up will absolutely be a herbalist/apothecary so that I can hopefully at some point make my own raid potions.  That has been the hardest reality check for me…  the concept of starting over with a fresh stable of characters and no infrastructure.  I guess that is a slight lie, because the guild horde side keeps shoving stuff into my hands and seems more than happy to support me…  but I am very much a person who prefers being able to support myself.  So I need to knock out some more characters so I can start to do that.  I am going tailor first because the biggest problem I have right now is the lack of a bag maker to feed my alts.

Spoiler Free Review

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Doing Silly Things

So the other day I said I would be doing a spoiler free review today, since I was in theory seeing it ahead of a good deal of the potential folks that will eventually see it.  As a result I am leading off my post with the single line tweet that I sent out last night after getting home.  Now I am going to talk about the day and night itself for a bit.  I was not one of those first day ticket scroungers, in fact I ended up waiting at least a week before trying to find any.  We have a smallish theater in town within walking distance of the house…  however last night it fell in the “too damned cold” territory to even consider walking.  For Lord of the Rings I was able to simply walk in on opening night and get tickets, without any pre-order…  so I had no real doubt that I would be able to see the movie this weekend without much fuss.  The original plan was to eat dinner at Plaza De Toros  a Mexican place that I like quite a bit that just happens to conveniently border the parking lot of the movie theater.  Just to make life easier… so we could meet up at 5pm and then walk over and start standing in line around 6pm for the 7pm show.  This at least was our plan…  our plan changed.

I went home over lunch yesterday to pick my tickets up, since pre-orders still need to be printed at the theater in our setup.  I ended up having a lengthy conversation with the worker that was manning the booth, and he told me that they were seating for the 7pm show… aka the first showing as early as 4:30 so that we could go ahead and get seats.  So when I went back and talked it through with my boss, we agreed that we would simply meet at the theater around 5ish instead and either eat at the theater… or like I did and grab something really quickly on the way home.  The positive of both options is our theater has unlimited refills on both soda and popcorn, so my boss went with that option.  The only negative is that I didn’t think to warn him not to take one of the Highways that is notoriously hell to travel on during the evening rush hour… so this meant it was running about 30 minutes later than planned.  Luckily about this time another friend popped her head out of the theater and hollered at me, and saved us some seats near her, her husband that I work with, and their son who was completely amped about the experience and wearing and Ezra Bridger costume.  So there we sat in the theater for an hour and a half ahead of the start time… chatting away and killing the time.

The Movie

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I had a lot of hope riding on this movie… but at the same time I kept trying to prepare myself for the potential of it being just as disappointing as the prequels.  In fact a good deal of my conversation with my friend was that both remember how excited we were for Phantom Menace and how disappointed we were immediately after.  I have to admit… I was not immediately in love with this movie.  Not saying I was disappointed in any fashion… but the movie has a look that is significantly different than the traditional “star wars look” for lack of a better term.  JJ Abrams simply has a different design ethic than George Lucas did… and this is perfectly okay… but I spent the first few moments of the movie “adjusting” to the style.  However at about the twenty minute mark… I was hooked and from that point through the end I was completely drawn into the world and believed that I was in fact watching a new Star Wars epic.  The characters are all excellent, and more importantly than that… their interactions…  are also awesome. There are jokes and quips… and not in a way that takes you outside of the picture.  Much of this movie had to be about passing the torch from one generation to the next… and feel like we are now firmly introduced to the conflict through the eyes of Rey, Finn, Poe Dameron, and Kylo Ren.  Not really going to delve into characters outside of the group, because those are the ones we already know quite a bit about thanks to the trailers.

What I like the most is that each of these characters is their own “new” character… and not “The New Vader” or “The New Luke”.  They are each their own person and don’t really fit any predetermined molds in the Star Wars universe.  The conflict that is set up… is one that I cannot wait to see resolved over the course of the next few movies.  In fact I am hungry to see what happens next…. which is something that never happened during the prequels.  This is the first “new” story that we have had from Star Wars on the big screen in a very long while, because the prequels had a fixed beginning and a fixed end point… and we were simply seeing how the details worked themselves out between.  This time with Force Awakens… we have no clue what is going to happen in the beginning, middle or end… and in spite of all of our machinations and predictions… we know that we know next to nothing.  There are certain aspects that I think seasoned veterans of Star Wars and the Expanded Universe might guess at…. but those guesses are never justified with a firm answer.  This movie feels very much in the tradition of A New Hope, and also feels like this grand Star Wars pen and paper adventure… played out on the screen.  The critics are more than likely not going to like it… because this is absolutely a “Star Wars” movie… and not something that is trying to get an Oscar.  That said… the costuming and use of practical effects absolutely SHOULD get an Oscar.

The little kid in me is alive and happy.  There was a period of time after the prequels where I doubted if my memories of Star Wars were really genuine.  I wondered if the universe really was as cool as I remembered it.  I am happy to say that yes…  this setting still has amazing things to show us.  Now stop reading this shit and go get tickets to see Force Awakens.